The far right government of Bibi Netanyahu has found itself somewhat isolated recently as it demands not just a monopoly of nuclear weaponry and near-monopoly of chemical weapons in the Middle East, not just continued illegal settlement of the West Bank, not just military aid from the US, but also regime change and war against Iran for enriching any uranium at all. The demands are so out of line with the NPT and with the Obama administration the Israeli government must surely fear it is losing the initiative for another war in the Middle East.
This is particularly so, it seems to me, because the Syria chemical weapons episode revealed how difficult it would be to get any clear American support for a pre-emptive war against Iran over allegations of potential WMD development. The Congress was clearly about to veto any such war against Assad even after the use of chemical weapons and after the deaths of 100,000 civilians. What chance is there that Israel and its proxies could easily authorize a new war against merely alleged nuclear weapon development in a regime that has recently declared itself eager to cooperate with the West? AIPAC has a lot of influence, and fear-mongering about Iranians is a rich vein to mine in the American psyche, but the odds of a war against Iran must look lower to Netanyahu right now, as his desperate and utterly exhausted speech at the UN revealed.
So what to do? Launch a war and deny it. Openly assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists, assuming no one in the West will even call you out. And now, a new provocation:
Mojtaba Ahmadi, who served as commander of the Cyber War Headquarters, was found dead in a wooded area near the town of Karaj, north-west of the capital, Tehran.
Five Iranian nuclear scientists and the head of the country’s ballistic missile programme have been killed since 2007. The regime has accused Israel’s external intelligence agency, the Mossad, of carrying out these assassinations.
Ahmadi was last seen leaving his home for work on Saturday. He was later found with two bullets in the heart, according to Alborz, a website linked to the Revolutionary Guard Corps. “I could see two bullet wounds on his body and the extent of his injuries indicated that he had been assassinated from a close range with a pistol,” an eyewitness told the website. The commander of the local police said that two people on a motorbike had been involved in the assassination.
It seems to me that the American president should forcefully condemn the assassination – and whoever ordered it. Governments that assassinate individuals in other countries are violating international law and setting a brutal precedent. If another country were to assassinate America’s head of cyber-warfare, would we regard it as something we should just ignore and move on from? Of course not. This is a blatant attempt to interfere with the diplomacy of the United States by using assassination as a provocation. Any government that acts in that way is no true ally of the United States.
(Photo by Abir Sultan – Pool/Getty Images.)
The Dish 